Tag: fosdem 2014

Bay Trail SoCs are new low power Intel ICs for tablets (Bay Trail-T, Z3000 series), mobiles (Bay Trail-M, N2800, N2900 and N3500 series), desktops (Bay Trail-D, J1800, J1900 and J2900 series) and embedded / industrial platforms (Bay Trail-I, E3800 series). Many Atom processors used to features PowerVR GPU, but it has now been replaced by Intel HD graphics in Bay Trail SoC. Jesse Barnes, working at Intel on software and drivers for Intel graphics devices, gives a presentation about Bay Trail SoCs with a focus on graphics. After an overview, and some ARM bashing regarding performance (Nvidia Tegra 4 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 800), and even power consumption (Tegra 4 only), he describe further details about Intel HD graphics found in the new Intel processors. Everything is basically in mainline, and you’ll need Linux 3.10 or greater, Mesa 9.2 or greater, and libva 1.2.1 or greater for proper support. Some initial GPU benchmarks showed somewhat disappointing results, but in this talk, …

Oliver Schinagl, a member of linux-sunxi community working on open source kernel and bootloader for AllWinner SoCs, has given a presentation of the community at FOSDEM 2014 to give an overview, and show what progress has been made to date. I’ll write a summary in this post, but if you want to watch the video and/or access the slides scroll down at the bottom of the post. After explaining what sunxi is, and introducing himself, he gave some information about AllWinner and their SoCs: Founded in 2007 in Zhuhai, Chiang now with 550 employees including 450+ engineers 15% market share in 2013 for tablet SoCs, only behind Apple. Products: F-series SoC (2010), A10 (2011), A13, A10s (2012), and A20 (2013). (cnsoft He skipped A31(s) and A80 here as they are not really supported by the community). They list “Open Source Source” and “GPLv3” in their marketing materials although they clearly violate GPL in some part of the code. Progress is …

Leon Anavi has spent some time building and running Tizen for Olimex A10s-OLinuXino-MICRO board based onAllWinner A10s cortex A8 processor, and gave a short presentation at FOSDEM 2014 showing the main steps involved in the project. The final result is basically a non-portable Tizen tablet with a main board connected to an LCD display. If you have an LCD screen, you could also use a monitor (VGA/HDMI) instead. After a short description of the hardware, and explaining it should also work on other AllWinner platforms such as Cubieboard, Leon gave a few no-nonsense recommendations he learned from his mistakes: Get a USB serial board for debugging Use recommended accessories from the manufacturer such as power supply or LCD display to make development easier Buy a board that can boot from micro SD or SD card, again for ease of development If something does not work… Restart the board! 🙂 In other to port Tizen to Allwinner, he took an existing …

Pandora is an open source handheld console which development started as far back as 2007. The project has had ups and downs, and some people have yet to receive the device they pre-ordered. As many components are now more difficult to source, Pandora has reach end-of-life, as Pandora 2 is now being developed with a subset of the original team, but has been renamed to DragonBox Pyra to start afresh. The new version aims to take to the good aspects of the original Pandora, and improve on the bad ones, so that DragonBox will have a faster hardware with a better looking case and better control. Here are the specifications listed on the project website: SoC – Texas Instruments OMAP 5432 SoC with 2x ARM Cortex-A15 @ 1.7Ghz with NEON SIMD, 2x ARM Cortex-M4, Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544-MP2 GPU for 3D graphic, and Vivante GC320 GPU for 2D graphics System Memory – 2GB RAM (TBC) Storage – 2x SDHC card …